I am genuinely confused as to my $271 charge while on free trial of $200

Question

I signed up for the $200 free credits on Azure Portal. About a week ago, today It says I have like $86 something left in credits so I'm like "well that's a bit odd, but maybe it's because I'm using a frontier model". Later (tonight) I check azure portal again and I have no credits, which I'm not surprised. Though I look at my charges, and it says I owe... $271 dollars, and I have 186$ in free credits! I genuinely need some help as to how this happened, I'm a college student, who barely can afford a meal let alone a $271 dollar bill. I even had a monthly budget set to $200

I made sure to check that the the deployment in azure foundry said Azure Portal OpenAI GPT 5, as that one and GPT I think 5.1 or something were the only models I managed to succesfully get deployed to use in Hermes.

Is there anything I can do here? I've tried the options for contacting support, but I can't seem to reach an option that allows me to write a full message.

And worst case scenario, I know I can't afford this, is Microsoft going to come for me? Am I facing jail time here? I have never been in this situation before.

Answer 1

That sounds awful. You need to open a billing-support case. See TP's response in this thread https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5620857/anyone-know-how-to-get-through-to-billing-support for instructions how to do this. It sounds as you have tried this already, but TP points out that the process is designed to lead you astray.